The Little Old Lady Killer – The Sensationalized Crimes of Mexico’s First Female Serial Killer

September 10 @ 6:15 pm - 8:15 pm

For three years, amid widespread public outrage, police in Mexico City struggled to
uncover the identity of the killer responsible for the ghastly deaths of forty elderly
women, many of whom had been strangled in their homes with a stethoscope by
someone posing as a government nurse. When Juana Barraza Samperio, a female
professional wrestler known as la Dama del Silencio (the Lady of Silence), was
arrested for her crimes as the Mataviejitas (the little old lady killer), her case disrupted traditional narratives about gender, criminality, and victimhood in the popular and criminological imagination.

Marshaling ten years of research, and one of the only interviews that Juana Barraza
Samperio has given while in prison, Susana Vargas Cervantes deconstructs this
uniquely provocative story. She focuses, in particular, on the complex, gendered
aspects of the case, asking: Who is a killer?